Sunday, June 12, 2005

all day long i guess i had the same thought. wanted to show you all the records i bought

Tonight was a really strange night at work. I was anticipating a really extraordinarilly busy night. Friday night was absurdly busy and we ended up having to eighty-six a bunch of shit. Not because it wasn't prepped, but because we didn't have anything in the house. I think I got the brunt of the business on my station, but we managed to get through it without pissing too many people off. So I was expecting another busy night. The weather was kinda nice and Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson were in town on their tour of minor league ballparks. Events like that usually make the restaurant busy before the event and crazy busy after. I guess it didn't let out until about 11:00, because that's what time I left and there were a bunch of people walking from the ballpark area of downtown to the bar area of downtown.
So we weren't very busy at all.
During one of the lulls, I made the Spaniards smile a lot with my mad anagramming skillz¹. I showed them a Mexican-themed anagram which I learned from the movie Word Wars. It all started when Alejandro was bragging about how much tequila he could drink, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to show him that

mas tequila

can be anagrammed into

que lastima

For those of you who don't recall your high school Spanish, or never had it, "qué lástima" translates to something close to "what a pity". So it's kinda funny that in Spanish, "more tequila" can be anagrammed into "what a pity". As in it's a pity that you drink so much tequila.
He got a good kick out of that and wasted no time showing the other amigos my trick.

I also spent a good deal of time telling Alejandro that the word "SPRAY" isn't pronounced "spry". Nor is "SPACE" pronounced "spice". He kept saying "es similar", and I had to explain to him that he was pronouncing a word that was quite different from what he thought he was saying. Yes, I knew what he meant, but he got on someone's case for pronouncing "TANGO" (the dance) as if it was "TENGO" (to have) and also for pronouncing "HOMBRE"(man) as if it was "HAMBRE"(hunger). Quite different. In every case, the listener will most likely understand that the speaker mispronounced, and will get what they mean, but if he's going to get picky about it, we should be picky right back.
At the end of the night, just before I left, the amigos described a chainsaw and asked me what the English word for it is. I have no idea why they wanted to know that, but I told them. It took a really long time for them to get anywhere close on the pronunciation, but I think they had it down. I'm really curious about why they wanted to know, but I don't suppose it's all that important.

Now Playing:
Elvis Costello --My Aim is True (thick dick version)
Elvis CostelloMy Aim is True(thick dick version)

¹Anagramming is rearranging all the letters in a word to form a different word. A simple example is that the four letters O-P-S-T can be arranged to spell OPTS, TOPS, STOP, POTS or POST. These are all anagrams of each other. This is a really good way for competitive Scrabble players to practice game strategy. The best players will rapidly anagram 8- or 9-letter words or even multiple word phrases. There are dozens of software programs and websites that can be used to build anagramming skills or to simply get anagrams.

1 comment:

greatwhitebear said...

I love anagrams, and used to be really good at them, but somehow the skill has diminished with the onset of age!